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"I first encountered Emperor Palpatine at Elstree Studios in the early 1980s. He was staring back at me from a make-up mirror, larger than life and 50 times as ugly. Yellow contact lenses stung my eyes and afforded little peripheral vision. As I walked onto a vast sound stage that had been transformed into a starship hangar, populated by seemingly endless platoons of gleaming white stormtroopers, the scale of George Lucas's vision hit me. This was space spectacle, a back-drop for a space opera of Wagnerian dimension."

He has also had a distinguished career in British theatre, working as Associate Artistic Director for the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (1986 - 1989), joint Artistic Director at London's Almedia Theatre (1990 - 2002) and as a Board Member of the National Theatre of Scotland. Recent and upcoming projects include a return to the role of Teddy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer (for which he won a Tony award) and in the world premiere of Robert Holman's Jonah & Otto, which marks his return to the Royal Exchange.

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Ian McDiarmid was born in Carnoustie, Scotland, in 1940s#19441944. He became a theatre aficionado when he was five years old, when his father took him to see an act by the name of Tommy Morgan in a theatre located in Dundee. In 2001 he stated, "It sort of fascinated me, and it also scared me. All those lights, all that make-up. I said to myself, 'I don't know what this is, but I want it."[1] However, fearing his father's disapproval, McDiarmid attended the University of St Andrews, where he received an M.A. in psychology. Soon after, he decided to pursue a career in the theatre instead, and took acting training courses at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. In 1968, McDiarmid received a gold medal for his work. This would later prove to be the first of many recognitions given to him for his work in the theatre.

McDiarmid playing "The Father" in Six Characters in Search of an Author.

He now has a highly successful career as a theatre director, and from 1990 until his retirement in 2001 was Joint Artistic Director of London's Almeida Theatre in Islington. He and his co-director Jonathan Kent revived the Almeida and persuaded many Hollywood stars including Kevin Spacey, Ralph Fiennes and Anna Friel to tread the boards in their humble theatre. They won the coveted London Evening Standard Award in 1998 for their efforts.

His directing work with the Almeida Theatre includes Scenes from an Execution with Glenda Jackson and Lulu with Joanne Whaley. McDiarmid himself portrayed many roles, including Goya in the opera work Terrible Mouth, the title role in Volpone and The Jew of Malla—which was performed at the Almeida and on tour in 1999.

In 1982, he played Harry Hackamore, a Howard Hughes-type character, in the play Seduced, by Sam Shepard. This showed his ability to convincingly play, in close-up, a character much older than himself. This is what attracted the attention of George Lucas and Richard Marquand, who decided that he could play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, which was already in production at the time.

After a week's recuperation, he returned to the show but, as with much of his personal life — little is known beyond his living alone for much of his time in London — the subject is not one he is willing to dwell on.

Many magazines and websites cited McDiarmid as a heroic actor, but he says in Times Online that he never even thought that way: "It was a big house, the pressure was on not to be crap. Very early on I thought, I really should not have eaten that sandwich so quickly, and I was irritated with myself. As the evening went on, I realised it was more than mild irritation, but I wasn’t being heroic. When I got off the stage, I said to the stage manager, 'I think I need a doctor', and she said, 'my friend's a doctor and she’s here tonight’. So then I surrendered, an ambulance arrived, took me to the hospital, and doctors examined me."